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MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
The Rise of the European Consolidation State
MPIfG Discussion Paper
Wolfgang Streeck
Wolfgang Streeck
The Rise of the European Consolidation State
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
February 2015
MPIfG Discussion Paper
ISSN 0944-2073 (Print)
ISSN 1864-4325 (Internet)
© 2015 by the author
Wolfgang Streeck is Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.
[email protected]
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Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
iii
Abstract
The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or
Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all
rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the “fiscal
crisis of the state” envisaged as early as the late 1960s, when postwar growth had come
to an end. Both the long-term increase in public debt and the current global attempts to
bring it under control were intertwined with the “financialization” of advanced capitalism and its complex functions and dysfunctions. The ongoing shift towards a consolidation state involves a deep rebuilding of the political institutions of postwar democratic capitalism and its international order. This is the case in particular in Europe
where consolidation coincides with an unprecedented increase in the scale of political
rule under European Monetary Union and with the transformation of the latter into
an asymmetric fiscal stabilization regime. The paper focuses on the developing structure of the new consolidation regime and its consequences for the relationship between
capitalism and democracy.
Zusammenfassung
Der Aufstieg des Konsolidierungsstaats in Europa folgt der Ablösung des klassischen
Steuerstaats durch den Schuldenstaat, ein Prozess, der in den 1980er-Jahren in allen reichen kapitalistischen Demokratien einsetzte. Konsolidierung ist die Antwort auf die
schon in den späten 1960er-Jahren, als die Epoche des Nachkriegswachstums zu Ende
ging, erwartete „Krise des Steuerstaats“. Sowohl der langfristige Anstieg der Staatsverschuldung als auch die gegenwärtigen weltweiten Versuche, ihn rückgängig zu machen,
sind mit der „Finanzialisierung“ des entwickelten Kapitalismus und ihren komplexen
Funktionen und Dysfunktionen auf das Engste verbunden. Der gegenwärtige Übergang
zu einem Konsolidierungsstaat beinhaltet einen tiefgreifenden Umbau der politischen
Institutionen des demokratischen Kapitalismus der Nachkriegszeit und seiner internationalen Ordnung. Dies gilt insbesondere für Europa, wo die fiskalische Konsolidierung
mit einem beispiellosen Zuwachs in der Reichweite politischer Herrschaft in Gestalt der
Europäischen Währungsunion und mit deren Transformation in ein asymmetrisches
Regime fiskalischer Stabilisierung zusammenfällt. Das vorliegende Papier untersucht
die sich herausbildende Struktur des neuen Konsolidierungsregimes und ihre Auswirkungen auf das Verhältnis von Kapitalismus und Demokratie.
iv
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Contents
1
From the fiscal crisis of the state to the Great Recession
1
2
Consolidation in hard times
9
3
The European consolidation state
14
4
A new regime
19
5
The consolidation state and democracy 25
References26
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
1
The Rise of the European Consolidation State
The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state,
or Steuerstaat (Schumpeter 1991[1918]), by what I have called the debt state (Streeck
2014a), a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the “fiscal crisis of the state” envisaged as early as
the late 1960s (O’Connor 1970a, 1970b, 1973) when postwar growth had come to an
end. Both the long-term increase in public debt and the current global attempts to bring
it under control were intertwined with the “financialization” of advanced capitalism and
its complex functions and dysfunctions (Magdoff/Sweezy 1987; Strange 1998; Krippner
2005; van der Zwaan 2014). As I will show, the ongoing shift towards a consolidation
state involves a deep rebuilding of the political institutions of postwar democratic capitalism and its international order, in particular in Europe where consolidation coincides
with an unprecedented increase in the scale of political rule under European Monetary
Union (EMU) and the transformation of the latter into an asymmetric fiscal stabilization regime.
In the following chapter I begin by briefly recounting the development that led to current consolidation efforts, with the financial crisis of 2008 as something like a critical
juncture. Next I sketch out the domestic and international politics of fiscal consolidation at a time of low growth (or even secular stagnation), a long-term increase in economic inequality, and record-setting overall indebtedness. Following this I will discuss
the specifically European dimension of consolidation, in particular the emergence, during the crisis, of an integrated European consolidation state as a unique configuration of
national states, international relations, and supranational agencies, with fundamental
implications for both domestic democracy and the international order. Finally, I look at
some of the political-economic consequences of consolidation, especially for the relationship between states, societies, and markets, and for what citizens will be entitled to
expect from democratic government and democratic participation in the future.
1 From the fiscal crisis of the state to the Great Recession
By the mid-1970s, the accumulated debt of states in the OECD world began to increase
steeply and steadily (Figure 1). Indebtedness rose by and large simultaneously, regardless
of country, national economic performance, or the political complexion of the governContribution to: Desmond King/Patrick Le Galés (eds.), The Reconfiguration of the State in Europe.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
2
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Figure 1
General government debt as a percentage of GDP, selected OECD countries,
1970–2013
Percentage of GDP
110
100
90
80
Unweighted average
70
60
50
40
30
70 972 974 976 978 980 982 984 986 988 990 992 994 996 998 002 000 004 006 010 008 012
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
2
2
2
19
Countries included: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA.
Source: OECD Economic Outlook No. 95.
ment of the day. North Sea oil made a difference for Britain, unification for Germany,
the rise and fall of defense spending for the United States, but always only temporarily.
Indebtedness increased for two decades until the mid-1990s, when debt levels seemed
to stabilize. After 2008, however, they rapidly returned to the long-term trend.
A growing level of public debt is the result of cumulative, non-Keynesian1 deficits in
public budgets: of an enduring inadequacy of government revenue compared to government spending. A popular explanation for this is offered by the “public choice” school of
institutional economics, which conceives public finance as a poorly managed “common
1
Non-Keynesian, because Keynesian debt is supposed to be paid off as the economy returns to an
adequate level of growth and public budgets generate a surplus of revenues over expenditure.
Anti-Keynesian economists, in particular in the United States, tried early on to blur this difference by accusing Keynes of having provided spendthrift governments with a good conscience
when they overdrew the public accounts (Buchanan/Wagner 1977, 1978).
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
3
pool” from which democratic-electoral majorities and office-seeking politicians may
satisfy ever more extravagant collective demands without having to assume responsibility for the costs (Buchanan/Tullock 1962). As I have shown, however (Streeck 2014c),
the secular rise of public debt in OECD countries coincided with a general, equally
secular decline in the political power of organized labor and social-democratic politics,
as indicated by long-term sinking rates of unionization, falling participation in national
elections, an almost complete disappearance of strikes, high and steady rates of unemployment, stagnant wages and rising economic inequality (Schäfer/Streeck 2013a).
If redistributive democracy didn’t do it, what did? As mentioned above, the Marxist
theorist James O’Connor, writing in the tradition of authors such as Schumpeter and
Goldscheid (1926, 1976[1917]), predicted already in the late 1960s a widening gap between the fiscal means governments could mobilize under capitalist relations of production and ownership, and the demands on state support made by an advancing capitalist economy. States under capitalism, according to O’Connor, had to provide both the
legitimacy and the efficiency of capital accumulation – the former through all sorts of
social consumption, the latter through investment in a public infrastructure. O’Connor
also expected mounting pressure on state finances by public sector trade unions claiming the same wages and benefits as workers in private industry and thereby exposing the
state to the “cost disease” of the service sector (Baumol 1967). It is interesting that Daniel Bell, almost at the opposite end of the political spectrum, found much to endorse
in O’Connor’s analysis, although he seems to have placed the emphasis, somewhat like
the public choice school, less on functional needs and structural contradictions than
on cultural change away from protestant values towards materialistic consumerism, or
“bourgeois hedonism” (Bell 1976: 250).
In hindsight, the route from the tax state to the debt state looks less straightforward
than one might have expected at its beginning. Empirically, deficits became endemic
and debt started to accumulate after the end of inflation in the early 1980s. Before then,
high inflation had substituted for real growth by wiping out parts of the public debt,
thus slowing down its accumulation. For a while it had also kept up employment.2
With monetary stabilization, unemployment became high and chronic, causing social
spending to increase until, with a delay of a decade or so, it was again brought under
control by neoliberal “reforms.” Up to this point, public debt was basically a matter of
the inertia of social security systems functioning as “automatic stabilizers.”3 In addition,
however, the end of inflation ended what is called “bracket creep” in the United States:
the movement of tax payers into higher income tax rates with rising nominal incomes.
2
3
On the political functions of inflation and the way they were taken over, in part, by public debt
in the 1980s, see Streeck (2011, 2014a).
That is, it was not a matter of growing demands for public handouts by spoiled citizens. However, unemployment insurance has undoubtedly become essential for the legitimation of the
capitalist economic system, and citizen entitlements for support in times of economic stress can
be curtailed only at high political risk, at least outside the United States.
4
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Figure 2
Total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, selected OECD countries, 1970–2011
Percentage of GDP
39
Unweighted average
37
35
33
31
29
27
25
70 972 974 976 978 980 982 984 986 988 990 992 994 996 998 000 002 004 006 008 010
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2
2
1
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1
2
2
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19
Countries included: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA.
Source: OECD Revenue Statistics.
Moreover, it reinforced tax resistance in particular among the middle class and lent
momentum to calls for “tax reform,” meaning tax cuts that typically most benefited the
payers of high taxes – like the Reagan tax cuts of the early 1980s.
Overall, the “fiscal crisis of the state” turned out to be caused less by an increase in
citizen entitlements than by a general decline in the taxability of democratic-capitalist
societies (Figure 2). While tax revenue had kept pace with public spending by and large
until the mid-1970s, by the mid-1980s it began to stagnate until, after a short recovery,
it started declining at the end of the century. By 2007, taxation levels were back where
they had been twelve years earlier, only to decline further in the course of the financial
crisis. A contributing factor was the “globalization” of the capitalist economy, which led
to increased tax competition among countries, resulting in tax cuts for corporations
and earners of high incomes (Genschel/Schwarz 2013). It also extended the opportunities for owners of capital to evade taxation by moving assets between countries or into
international tax havens (OECD 2013). If, in other words, the increasing fiscal problems of the rich capitalist democracies after the 1970s were due a revolution of rising
demands, that revolution occurred not among ordinary citizens, but among capital and
those in command of it.
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
5
Another respect in which early theories of fiscal crisis had failed to anticipate what
was coming was that they underestimated the possibilities of capitalist states to finance
deficits for a protracted period of time by borrowing. Actually the rise of public debt in
the final third of the twentieth century and beyond was linked to the financialization
of the capitalist economy, which in part consisted of an explosive growth of its financial sector and of the amount of credit money it produces. Credit enabled states under
capitalism to live with a widening gap between citizen demands and capitalist needs for
infrastructural support on the one hand, and the increasingly powerful resistance by
taxpayers – individual as well as corporate – to pay the bill on the other. Financialization
made it possible for governments to push back the moment when they had to do something about the increasing inadequacy of their fiscal means. Low nominal interest rates,
made possible by the return to sound money, helped as they made rising debt levels
more manageable; in fact, they soon began luring governments into substituting credit
for taxes as the latter became more difficult to collect. There also was an international
dimension to the debt state. In particular, the United States began to sell its public debt
abroad to sovereign investors, especially to the governments of oil-producing countries
looking for opportunities to “recycle” their surpluses and in return gain military protection against regional adversaries and their own peoples.
In subsequent years “financial services” became the most important growth industry by
far in both the United States and the United Kingdom (Krippner 2011). After the end
of the Bretton Woods monetary regime, with the dollar continuing to be the leading
global reserve currency, the United States enjoyed the “exorbitant privilege” (Giscard
d’Estaign) of being able to indebt itself internationally in its own currency and repay its
debt, if need be, by printing basically unlimited amounts of it. The rich supply of fiat
dollars that ensued nourished an expanding financial industry about to turn into the financial sector of capitalism worldwide. Aggressive deregulation of financial institutions
allowed for unprecedented “financial innovations” that attracted capital from all over
the world and became a major instrument for governments not only looking for new
economic growth but also desperately seeking access to credit. Indeed, as the overall
credit supply expanded, it was not just states that became increasingly “leveraged” but
also corporations and, later, private households. Thus the rise of the debt state became
embedded in a movement of advanced capitalism as a whole towards higher and higher
indebtedness across the board – with public debt in fact amounting to no more than a
small share of overall debt (for six selected countries see Figure 3).4
How closely the management of the debt state came to be connected to the leveraging
of capitalism in general became particularly visible in the 1990s when the first attempts
were made at fiscal consolidation. In the United States, Clinton had won the presidency
4
Figures become even more impressive if the liabilities of the financial sector are added. In the
United States, they are today as high as the liabilities of the three other sectors together. Total liabilities, including all sectors, increased from roughly 400 percent of GDP in 1974 to more than
800 percent after 2010.
6
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Figure 3
Liabilities (excluding financial corporations) as a percentage of GDP, by sector,
six countries, 1995–2011
Percentage of GDP
600
600
France
500
500
400
400
300
300
200
200
100
100
0
1995
1997
1999
600
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
0
1995
500
400
400
300
300
200
200
100
100
1997
1999
600
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
0
1995
500
400
400
300
300
200
200
100
100
1997
1999
2001
2003
Non-financial corporations
1999
2005
2007
2009
Households
2011
0
1995
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2005
2007
2009
2011
2005
2007
2009
2011
Sweden
1997
1999
600
United Kingdom
500
0
1995
1997
600
Italy
500
0
1995
Germany
2001
2003
United States
1997
1999
2001
2003
General government
Source: OECD National Accounts, non-consolidated data.
in 1992 by promising to do something about “the double deficit” in the federal budget
and the balance of trade. The “peace dividend” after 1989 seemed to open a window of
opportunity for spending cuts, and that a country like Sweden experienced two successive fiscal crises (1977ff. and 1991ff.) was seen as a general warning signal. Orchestrated
by the United States through international organizations like the OECD and the IMF,
capitalist democracies made an effort to break the upward trend in their indebtedness by
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
7
returning to balanced budgets through spending cuts and reforms of their budgeting institutions (Poterba/von Hagen 1999). Indeed, countries succeeded in the 1990s in bringing down public expenditure to levels that more closely matched their stagnant revenue
(see Figure 2). In the United States, this went as far as producing a budget surplus by the
end of Clinton’s second term. It should be noted, however, that this was due to a large
extent to low interest rates made possible by monetary expansion, to savings on defense
spending in the wake of 1989 (soon to prove short-lived), to economic growth (especially in the financial sector) inflating the denominator of the debt equation, and to savings on social security (as a result of both low unemployment and cuts in entitlements).5
The consolidation attempts of the 1990s responded to, perhaps misinformed, concerns
among American voters about high public debt. But one can also assume creditors were
concerned about the long-term solvency of sovereign borrowers. In any case, in an era
of financial deregulation and expansion, pressures for fiscal consolidation presented an
opportunity for cutting back the state in favor of the private sector, by referring citizens
to private credit as a substitute for previously free public services. Thus, financialization not only required fiscal retrenchment – to ensure the further creditworthiness of
sovereign borrowers – it also made it possible, and with it the retrenchment of the state.
As households indebted themselves to compensate for cuts in public provision, aided
by low interest rates furnished by obliging central banks, they opened the door for the
private sector to move into fields that had previously been the domain of government.
They also filled the gap in aggregate demand caused by cuts in public spending – an effect referred to as “privatized Keynesianism” (Crouch 2009, 2011).6
Far from being unsuccessful, the first wave of consolidation managed to bring down
public debt during the decade from the mid-1990s to the eve of the Great Recession (see
Figure 1) – helped in Europe by the Maastricht Treaty on European Monetary Union
with its debt limits, while hindered in the United States after 2001 by the Bush tax cuts
and rapidly rising defense spending. However, all of this was undone when the pyramid
of private debt that had grown alongside public debt – all the more so after the increase
of the latter had temporarily been halted – collapsed in the financial crisis of 2008. Here
again, the close interconnection between the debt state and the financialization of modern capitalism became apparent, as states found themselves forced to absorb the bad
debt created by the private sector under financial deregulation. In fact, they had to take
up additional debt for stimulus spending to prevent a complete breakdown of their national economies. Ironically, it was the debt that states incurred to protect societies from
the fallout of speculative lending and borrowing – encouraged by government policies
of deregulation and cheap money – that made “financial markets” suspicious about
5
6
Between 1993 and 2000, public expenditure in the U.S. declined by four percent of GDP while
tax revenue increased by two percent. The 1993 federal deficit of four percent of GDP turned
into a surplus of two percent in 2000.
See in addition, among others, Prasad (2012), Rajan (2010), and Trumbull (2012).
8
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Figure 4
Long-term interest rates on government bonds, selected OECD countries, 1998–2014
Percent
7
6
5
ES
4
IT
UK
US
3
FR
2
DE
1
JP
0
19
98
19
99
20
00
20
01
20
02
20
03
20
04
20
05
20
06
20
07
20
08
20
09
20
10
20
11
20
12
20
13
20
14
Including Greece would have distorted the scale and made changes in the interest rates for other
countries invisible.
Source: OECD Economic Outlook No. 95.
states’ capacity to live up to their obligations as debtors. When declining creditor confidence showed itself in rising risk premiums on government bonds from a number of
countries (Figure 4), it was time for the debt state to be rebuilt into a consolidation state.7
7
Figure 4 documents that there is no one-to-one relationship between a country’s level of indebtedness and the risk premium it has to pay in capital markets – Japan, for example, refinances
its huge national debt at record-low interest rates. The figure also shows that sudden jumps in
interest rates for just a few countries (one could add Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and others for
the post-2009 period) are capable of setting in motion a general effort at regaining market confidence by “reform,” as in the European Union. See the next section.
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
9
2 Consolidation in hard times
Understanding the politics of the consolidation state requires a look at the political
economy of the debt state. The rise of the debt state took place simultaneously with
a general increase in economic inequality and was closely linked to it. The declining
taxability of capitalist economies in the course of “globalization” produced a rising demand for credit on the part of governments, while tax cuts for the increasingly rich increased the corresponding supply. As a result, the debt state found it convenient to substitute credit for ever more difficult-to-collect taxes, to the extent that citizens remained
willing to consider government bonds a safe investment. States going into debt allow
citizens with high incomes to keep their money instead of having it confiscated, invest
it safely, collect interest on it, and pass it on to their children. Unlike what is sometimes
suggested in the literature (Wagschal 1996), the rich in rich democracies are not necessarily opposed to government debt since the alternative may be higher taxes, especially
for them. What they must be concerned about, however, is too much debt compromising the capacity of governments to service it.
How much is too much debt cannot be answered generally. States default if they cannot
repay old debt by taking up new debt. At what level of indebtedness financial markets
will cease to extend credit to states differs, because it depends not on the magnitude of
the existing debt as such, but on the confidence of the markets in it being repaid. As debt
levels rise, therefore, debt states must intensify their efforts to secure that confidence to
avoid rising risk premiums and at some point losing their ability to borrow. Normally
states can be expected to do their utmost not to default, as this may for a long time exclude them from borrowing. One advantage they have in this respect is that they may
use force – on their citizens – to raise the funds they need to pay their creditors.8 Governments may also oblige some of their subjects, especially financial firms under prudential supervision, to invest part of their capital in government bonds, on the premise
that these are particularly safe. On the other hand,
since a sovereign government, by definition, controls its own affairs, it cannot be obliged to pay
back its debt …[9] Failure or refusal of the government of a sovereign state to pay back its debt
in full … may be accompanied by a formal declaration … not to pay (repudiation) or only partially pay its debts … or [by] the de facto cessation of due payments.10
8
As has often been noted, the rise of democratic constitutionalism, by making “the people” the
sovereign, turned sovereign debt into debt of the people. Unlike a king, a people never dies, and
in a democracy government debt can be construed as debt incurred by the people themselves,
who can therefore be held morally responsible for it (Fourcade et al. 2013). The probability that
public debt would be conscientiously served was highest after the first wave of democratization,
when the King in Parliament took the place of the King in person, and the parliament consisted
basically of holders of property, including state papers. However, a popular-redistributive democracy may potentially be as predatory in relation to its creditors as a personal ruler.
9 In particular, there is as yet no legal way for creditors to take possession of a defaulting debtor
state’s assets. In the past this was sometimes done by war.
10 Wikipedia, “Sovereign Default,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_default, accessed September 24, 2014.
10
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Attempts to establish an international bankruptcy regime for states that would regulate
the rights and obligations of debtors and creditors and establish some form of international jurisdiction have been unsuccessful so far.
Fiscal consolidation, then, is essentially a confidence-building measure. Its objective
is to make a state attractive for financial investment by making it clear to the financial
markets that the state is in a position to service its debt. Consolidation is rarely about
states ceasing to borrow altogether. Even after a state’s accumulated debt has begun to
shrink, there will long remain old debt that has to be refinanced on a revolving basis.
Regardless of whether their debt is growing or declining, states thus continue to have a
vital interest in low risk premiums on government bonds, since even a minor increase in
the average rate of interest they have to pay may wreak havoc on their finances.11
Today’s emerging consolidation state is a political-institutional response to financial
market demands for a break in the trend towards ever higher public indebtedness, at a
time when debt levels were rising dramatically, annihilating all gains from the first wave
of consolidation that began in the 1990s. To continue lending, financial markets want to
be assured that public debt is under political control, certified by a demonstrated capacity of governments to halt and indeed reverse its long-term growth. Creditors’ calls for
consolidation reflect the experience of the last four decades that the Keynesian promise
of governments deleveraging in good times to be able to incur new debt in bad times
had not been kept: that fiscal reflation had a ratchet effect producing ever higher debt
levels, in effect continuously expanding public expenditure. Consolidation is to reverse
what had increasingly seemed like a one-way street towards insolvency and make governments return once and for all to fiscal solidity and sustainability.
Debt containment or reduction may be achieved by not replacing paid-back debt or,
failing that, by “fiscal repression”: a combination of low interest rates with higher rates
of inflation, or nominal growth, over a longer period of time, by which existing debt is
slowly devalued. Lowering or at least stabilizing public debt by fiscal repression may be
an acceptable way of restoring financial credibility, as long as the resulting “haircut”12
remains moderate and big investors are given early enough warning. In practice, consolidation as a confidence-building measure proceeds, almost as a matter of course,
not by raising revenue but by cutting expenditure. Exceptions may be higher sales taxes,
user fees, and social security contributions making tax regimes more regressive. Muchpublicized efforts to close tax loopholes and prevent international base shifting, most
recently at the G20 level, have yet to produce results; in any case, they would seem capable at most of slowing down the decline of tax revenue, not of ending or reversing it.
11 An increase in the average interest rate on a state’s accumulated debt by two percentage points
would mean an increase in public spending by five percentage points in a country with a total
debt of one hundred percent of GDP and a government share of 40 percent of GDP. Total defense spending for most NATO countries is far below two percent of GDP.
12 A colloquial expression for a sovereign debtor unilaterally changing the terms of a loan in a fiscal crisis at the expense of its creditors.
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
11
A budget surplus, including one owed to lower interest rates or unexpected increases in
tax revenue, is preferably used to pay off debt or cut taxes, to suppress political temptations to restore previous spending cuts.
An established consolidation state is one that has managed to institutionalize a political
commitment and build a political capacity never to default on its debt, projecting an
uncompromising determination to place its obligations to its creditors above all other
obligations. It features a general configuration of political forces that makes spending
increases difficult while making spending cuts, on everything except debt service, easy.
Countries with a small state, like the United States and Japan, are more likely to be recognized as consolidation states since a small government share in the economy can be
taken to indicate both an entrenched aversion to state spending and the possibility for
tax increases as ultima ratio in financial emergencies.13
A country that comes close to the ideal is the United States, which combines powerful
anti-taxation politics with a sacrosanct constitutional commitment never to compromise its “full faith and credit.”14 In fact, in the United States, as in no other country, it is
understood across the political board that properly servicing the public debt must take
precedence over everything else, including public pensions. Even the Tea Party movement contributed – unintentionally – to the perception of the United States as a solid
debtor when it was defeated in 2011 and 2013 over the national debt ceiling by a coalition between the president and the Republican leadership – who at the time could not
agree on anything except that the United States must in all circumstances service its
debt, if necessary by incurring more debt.
I have described the debt state elsewhere (Streeck 2014a: 80ff.) as having two constituencies, citizens and creditors – or two peoples, a Staatsvolk and a Marktvolk. Debt
states have to be loyal to both, with the two struggling over who is to be the principal
stakeholder and who, in a fiscal crunch, has to give. The consolidation state settles that
struggle in favor of its second constituency, its Marktvolk, by firmly internalizing the
primacy of the state’s commercial-contractual commitments to its lenders over its public-political commitments to its citizenry. In a consolidation state, citizens lose out to
investors, rights of citizenship are trumped by claims from commercial contracts, voters
range below creditors, the results of elections are less important than those of bond auctions, public opinion matters less than interest rates and citizen loyalties less than investor confidence, and debt service crowds out public services (for an ideal-typical representation of the relations between debt states and their two constituencies see Table 1,
taken from Streeck 2014b: 81). One could also speak of two kinds of public debt: explicit
13 Thus, Japan could in principle resolve its huge public debt problem by introducing a higher
sales tax, and the United States could do the same with a federal gasoline tax, even one remaining clearly below European levels.
14 Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, which has come to be interpreted as applying to US treasury bonds and similar financial commitments.
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MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
in relation to “the markets” and Table 1 The democratic debt state and its two peoples
implicit in relation to citizens, Staatsvolk
Marktvolk
the latter downgraded in com- national
international
parison to the former – or of two citizens
investors
civil
rights
contractual claims
classes of property rights or entivoters
creditors
tlements: capitalist and civic, the
elections (periodic)
auctions (continual)
former rising above the latter. In
public opinion
interest rates
short, a consolidation state may loyalty
“confidence”
be described as one whose com- public services
debt service
mercial market obligations take
precedence over its political citizenship obligations, where citizens lack access to political
or ideological resources with which to contest this.
Converting a popular democracy into a consolidation state takes time since it requires
disempowering democratic-egalitarian politics in favor of solid customership in financial markets. The goal is to resolve the basic ambivalence of democracy as a depersonalized and therefore less capricious, longer-lived, and more reliable debtor, on the one
hand, and a sovereign agent of wealth allocation and redistribution, on the other. This
involves tying the hands of the state by redefining its sovereignty into a guarantee of its
ability to repay its debt, for example by making balanced budgets an enforceable constitutional requirement. While a balanced budget or a budget surplus may be presented
by governments to citizens as a step on the way to governmental independence from financial investors,15 the immediate purpose is to reassure lenders that their investment is
safe and that they can at any time be paid and repaid. Lower risk premiums may also be
achieved by other institutional reforms, to the extent that these credibly prevent future
governments from once again mitigating capitalist distributional conflicts by public
spending and thereby jeopardizing the state’s reliability as a debtor.
Preventing the debt state from predating on its lenders may also be done by international means. States have a collective interest to ensure that the reputation of sovereign
debtors is not jeopardized by wayward governments using their sovereignty to expropriate their lenders. International institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the
European Union help potentially insolvent states with loans, on the condition they reform themselves so that they can credibly promise not again to overdraw their accounts.
Discipline may also be exercised by hegemonic countries aligned with global financial
markets, such as the United States. The latest case here is Argentina. Having borrowed
in New York, the country unexpectedly found itself under the jurisdiction of an American court, which declared the restructuring in 2002 of part of its debt to be illegal.16 As
15 See, for example, the various interview statements by the former Swedish Prime Minister, Göran
Persson, reported by Mehrtens (2013).
16 This followed years of inventive attempts by American “vulture funds” to mobilize the civil laws
of several countries to make the Argentine state deliver on the original conditions of the loan.
Essentially what this was about was substituting national commercial law for the still nonexistent international sovereign bankruptcy law. See The New York Times, “Vulture Fund News,”
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
13
all major banks have, by necessity, subsidiaries in the United States, any government
using the banking system to handle its financial transactions may be exposed to American legal action defending the property rights of investors in public debt, should the
current rulings stand.
Turning the debt state of the late twentieth century into a consolidation state is not an
easy undertaking, especially as it takes place in hard economic times. With economic
inequality growing everywhere, debt-financed social expenditure helped states maintain an appearance of egalitarian even-handedness. Budget-balancing by cutting social
benefits and social services risks a democratic backlash unless political institutions are
rebuilt to insulate economic policies from popular-electoral pressures, in a Hayekian
(Streeck 2014a) or post-democratic (Crouch 2004) way. Moving towards a consolidation state is also made difficult by the fact that it is taking place at a time of low growth,
if not secular stagnation,17 with austerity likely to cause further economic contraction
(Blyth 2013). (It is also made more urgent by the additional debt accumulated as a result of the financial crisis of 2008.) To investors in public finance seeking reassurance
that their investment is safe, economic growth is as important as balanced budgets; both
at the same time are, however, difficult if not impossible to obtain. Politically, institutional reforms and fiscal austerity are hard to impose under conditions of low growth
and rising inequality on a society that still has recourse to democratic elections, while
economically they may further impair aggregate demand and produce a deflationary
downward spiral. Although the reigning neoliberal doctrine promises growth as a future reward for present austerity, for investors waiting to be paid that promise may be
too uncertain, and the future too far away, to make them feel better.
The transformation of the debt state into a consolidation state is under way, but it is
far from smooth. While interrelated through global financial markets, its local manifestations differ, although the logic is the same. Some institutional reforms have been
implemented, but many are still works in progress. In Europe especially, consolidation is
politically contested, in particular in countries like France and Italy. As creditors worry
about consolidation subverting economic growth, and governments about austerity undercutting political stability, public debt has further increased in most countries and was
still rising in 2014 – even though nobody believes present levels to be sustainable. Currently much of the refinancing of debt states is provided by central banks, in the United
States and Japan directly, in Europe indirectly by the European Central Bank lending to
national banking systems which, in turn, lend to their national states.18 But although the
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/vulture_funds/index.html, accessed September 24, 2014.
17 As suggested by none other than Lawrence (“Larry”) Summers, in a now legendary presentation
at the IMF Economic Forum on November 8, 2013. See also his essay in the Financial Times on
December 15 of the same year, where he proposes that even before the crisis of 2008, “bubbles
and loose credit were only sufficient to drive moderate growth.”
18 The European Central Bank (ECB) is not allowed under the Maastricht Treaty to lend to member countries, which is why it had to devise ways to circumvent the treaty.
14
Figure 5
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Total central bank assets
Trillion US dollars
20
Other EMEs
16
Other Asian EMEs
12
People‘s Bank of China
Bank of England
8
Bank of Japan
Eurosystem
4
Federal Reserve
0
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Source: Bank for International Settlements, 84th Annual Report, p. 86.
balance sheets of the leading central banks have rapidly expanded since 2008 (Figure 5),
historically low interest rates and unprecedented infusions of liquidity into the world
economy have as yet failed to stimulate economic growth, thereby making market-conforming reforms more palatable and helping states pay their lenders. Like public debt,
there is agreement among economic elites that the policy of cheap money cannot be
continued forever. What is being debated is how long it can still be relied upon and how
it can be ended without causing a new political-economic megacrisis.
3 The European consolidation state
The emerging consolidation state in Europe differs in several respects from the U.S.
model. Western European countries do not have command of a hegemonic currency,
and redistributive democracy has not yet lost its popular support. Nor is the primacy of
states’ explicit debt to capital markets over their implicit debt to their citizens as wellestablished as in the United States, and the same applies to austerity as a principle of
domestic state activity, except perhaps in Britain and post-communist Eastern Europe
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
15
(which, however, did not have enough time to build up potentially critical amounts of
public debt). Also, in the Europe of the European Monetary Union (EMU), consolidation takes on a peculiar form as it proceeds under an international regime governing the
fiscal and financial policies of a collection of formally sovereign nation-states, so as to
secure their compatibility with a common supranational monetary policy. Unless otherwise indicated, the following discussion will focus only on the Eurozone, or Euroland,
and its member states.
The construction of the euro monetary regime betrays its origin in the first global consolidation wave in the 1990s. Member states were not allowed to run budget deficits
above three percent of Gross Domestic Product, and accumulated debt was not to exceed sixty percent of GDP. The sole mission of the European Central Bank (ECB) was to
defend monetary stability, and extending credit to member states was explicitly forbidden. Like the German Bundesbank, the ECB is independent from elected government
and insulated from political pressures; in fact it is even more independent as it does
not have a unified supranational government as a political counterpart but faces only a
council of heads of national governments. Member-state compliance with the rules of
Euroland is to be enforced by another nonpolitical supranational authority, the European Commission. This regime, fashioned after the German model, soon proved unable to enforce fiscal discipline even on Germany. It also failed to prevent the post-2008
euro crisis, when public and private debtors in a number of EMU member countries
suddenly appeared over-indebted and lost the confidence of their creditors, especially
as their national economies became locked into stagnation, with a possibility of debt
deflation. As a consequence, risk premiums on public debt in several EMU member
countries began to rise; in countries like Italy, Greece, Spain and Ireland they reached
an unmanageable level.
As indicated, there are no general economic limits to public debt, which requires strictly
individualized, case-by-case risk assessment on the part of creditors. Under EMU, financial markets had freely lent to weaker member countries at historically low interest rates,
apparently on the assumption that, regardless of the Treaty, their debt would somehow
be mutualized should they become insolvent. After 2008 this turned out to have been
an illusion, probably inspired by integrationist forces in the Commission, and lending
to Mediterranean countries became an international counterpart to subprime lending
in the U.S. housing market. Since servicing the accumulated debt remained a national
responsibility, it became apparent that the decoupling of fiscal and financial policy from
national democracy, as demanded by financial markets, had not gone far enough. Democratic resistance to austerity in the South and to a “transfer union” in the North stood in
the way of restoring investor confidence in Southern member states. Hopes that growth
would return as a result of neoliberal “reform” – of fiscal policies and institutions, as well
as of labor markets and social security systems – were either disappointed or remained
untested, as reform got stuck in domestic politics. In the resulting stalemate, the ECB
bought time for the euro by flooding the markets with money, as ersatz debt mutualization, to keep interest rates low and member states solvent. At the same time, the ECB
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insists that this cannot continue forever and that national governments have in return to
push through institutional and economic reforms, so as to make European capitalism, as
organized in EMU, more “market-conforming” (Angela Merkel).
The rebuilding of the EMU state system into a European consolidation state proceeds
slowly and fitfully, punctuated by national and European elections that force governments to make themselves appear responsive to citizen concerns, including those they
otherwise discredit as “populist.” While the emerging European consolidation state
amounts to a novel kind of political-economic regime, it is being developed out of EMU
in a gradual, path-dependent institutional reform process. Its outstanding characteristic
is a unique amalgam of national, international, and supranational rules and institutions,
of constitutions and treaties, and of national politics and international relations. The
result is a state consisting of states, with domestic politics that combine diverse national
politics, foreign relations between nation-states, and supranational authority wielded
over them in their collective name by bureaucratic agencies. As a fiscal consolidation
regime, the EMU in its evolving form as an international consolidation state may be
characterized as follows.
1. In a first approximation, the emerging European consolidation state is a mutual surveillance and control arrangement among what are still formally sovereign nationstates. It is founded on a shared interest in states’ collective reputation in financial
markets and on the recognition that the default of one state may have adverse effects
on all others, for example in the form of higher interest rates or repercussions on national banking systems. The transformation of the EMU into an international consolidation state on top of a set of national welfare states is to secure an ever tighter
coupling of their economic behavior through mutual observation, supervision, and
discipline. Institutional development starts from the original structure of the EMU
as established in the 1990s, which is being gradually expanded and strengthened in
the course and in the aftermath of the post-2008 fiscal crisis, among other things
through new regulations, in particular the so-called Six-pack, and new treaties, like
the Fiscal Compact passed in late 2011 and early 2012, respectively.19
19 Details of rules and procedures are, as always in the European Union, extremely complex and
fully comprehensible only for experts. In essence, the updated macroeconomic regime of the
EMU involves binding obligations on member states to commit themselves constitutionally to
balanced budgets. It also institutes comprehensive current surveillance of member states’ fiscal
policies by the European Commission. Under the so-called Excessive Deficit Procedure, states
may be subject to heavy automatic fines if they fail to keep their public deficits below specified limits. Moreover, under the Excessive Imbalance Procedure, countries may be specifically
ordered by the Commission to revise their macroeconomic policies and change relevant institutions, such as their national collective bargaining regimes and their social policies, so as to make
them compatible with supranational coordination. Individual policy directives may extend to a
wide range of issues not hitherto under European Union jurisdiction. For more see Höpner and
Rödl (2012), Scharpf (2013: 134–136) and Streeck (2014a: 107–109).
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
17
2. As an international regime not directly exposed to traditional class politics and popular democracy, the European consolidation state is in a better position than a nationstate to impose on unreliable electorates a market-conforming fiscal policy, a policy
of austerity, and the primacy of debt service over public services. Disempowering the
Staatsvolk in favor of the Marktvolk (Table 1) by institutionally decoupling popular
democracy from the management of the economy20 is more easily done by means of
international than by national politics. As the community of states gains power over
its members, vested in both horizontal international agreements and vertical supranational institutions, it can even recall elected national governments and install representatives of the international financial industry as national heads of government,
as was done by the European Council in Greece and Italy in November 2011.21 The
objective is to wrest what is left of national sovereignty over economic policy from
notoriously difficult national electorates through aggressive institutional reform at
international as well as national level.
3. More than in any nation-state, the EMU’s central bank, the ECB, can act as an external force in relation to democratic governments. Administering the monetary policy
of eighteen nation-states, it is sufficiently far away from the domestic politics of each
of them to make monetary policy support for national governments conditional on
their cooperation with respect to fiscal policy and institutional reform. Together with
other international organizations, in particular the International Monetary Fund
and the European Commission, the ECB has deeply intervened into the domestic
politics of formally still sovereign member states, among other things prescribing to
the Greek government how many civil servants it had to dismiss and when. Since the
ECB must be concerned above all about the confidence of financial markets in the
currency that it administers, the reforms it demands from member states can only
be of a market-conforming kind. In particular, the ECB cannot be supportive of any
egalitarian-redistributive ambitions of national governments. The ECB’s unprecedented political independence translates into an unprecedented capacity to cater
to the interests of financial markets and into unprecedented dependence on these.
4. The international relations embedded in the EMU consolidation state are highly
asymmetrical. Economically weak countries, while in the majority, face a small
number of economically strong countries in a position effectively to dictate to them,
by threatening to withhold financial support. Germany, on account of its regained
economic power after 2008 and as the main beneficiary of EMU due to its export
strength and to currently low European interest rates,22 de facto governs the EMU as
20 I have described this as the imposition of a Hayekian regime on the European political economy
(Streeck 2014a).
21 When the Prime Minister of Greece, Andreas Papandreou, was replaced with the central banker
Lukas Papademos, and the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi had to resign in favor of the former European Commissioner and Goldman Sachs functionary, Mario Monti.
22 This was different in the early 2000s when Euro interest rates, set to combat inflation in the
South, were too high for low-inflation Germany (Scharpf 2013).
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MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
a German economic empire. In the form of the euro, it imposes a hard currency of
the kind Germany has become used to since the war on the rest of Europe, including on countries like France and Italy that have long relied on a soft currency as a
means of managing domestic distributional conflict while intermittently relying on
devaluation to restore temporarily their international competitiveness.23 There is no
provision in the treaties for turning the EMU into an arrangement for international redistribution, also known as a “transfer union” – quite apart from the fact that
even Germany and France together are far too small to provide the weaker countries with more than symbolic economic assistance (Streeck/Elsässer 2014). To the
extent that some redistribution from the strong to the weak is required for keeping
over-indebted states solvent and monetary union together, it must be accomplished
through covert channels, also because of certain voter resistance in the European
North. Serving as an invisible conduit for money transfusions is another function
today performed by the ECB.
5. The institutional reforms imposed under EMU on its over-indebted member states
would, if carried out to their end, result in a deep restructuring of national political
economies, especially in the Mediterranean countries. Based on the “German model” as it is understood today,24 such reforms would in particular undo the historical
class compromise in countries like Italy and France which accepted high rates of
inflation and high public spending, including frequent public deficits, as a price for
social peace (Hall 2012 ; Blankart 2013). High inflation made high public debt bearable because it devalued the debt on a current basis; low interest rates and high state
subsidies provided for stable employment; and negative effects on external competitiveness were compensated from time to time by devaluation. To the extent that this
system supported “rigid” labor markets, short working hours, costly public services,
high and early pensions, and high and regular nominal wage increases, it was a thorn
in the eye of a growing middle class, as well as of technocratic-nationalist elites bent
on “modernizing” their countries. To them, the EMU promised to break institutionally entrenched resistance to capitalist modernization by undoing the various
economic fixes on which their national class compromise depended. By having the
bitter medicine of austerity and flexibility forced on their countries from the outside,
they hoped they would ultimately become able to “stand on their own feet,” get ready
for “globalization,” and compete successfully with Germany.
23 There is now a large body of literature on the frictions caused by differently organized national
political economies being forced under a common monetary regime. See, for example, Armingeon and Baccaro (2012), Blankart (2013), Hall (2012), Johnston/Regan (2014), and Feldstein
(2011).
24 Some two decades ago, the “German model” was known for relatively low inequality and high
social protection under a negotiated social compact between capital and labor. Today, Germany
is identified with wage restraint, zero inflation, surplus exports, budget balancing, and “welfare
reform.”
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
19
EMU and the international consolidation state growing out of it represent a unique
opportunity for the capitalist rationalization of “backward” economies, states, and societies. Nevertheless, because of the danger of democratic obstruction, change towards
market-conforming democracy can be administered only slowly. Both national and international politics around fiscal consolidation are complex and convoluted; see the
agonies of the Hollande government in France, originally elected to replace Merkozy, in
the face of German pressures to accede to German-European international consolidation policies. See also the rise in Germany of the anti-euro party, AfD, which expresses
and indeed cements German resistance to a “transfer union,” or the growing international tensions between France and Italy on the one hand and Germany on the other.
At the end of 2014, the discussion was about a managed devaluation of the common
currency as a substitute for national devaluation; about moving the consolidation deadlines of the Fiscal Compact forward; and about “growth programs” for the South and
for France, to be funded by new debt, even though debt is already at a historical high
and adding to it has not produced growth for more than half a decade now.25 Given the
unsustainability of further debt accumulation, these are rear-guard battles on the collective march toward balanced budgets, enforced by pressures from financial markets
on the one hand and by German hegemony on the other.
4 A new regime
Rebuilding a debt state into a consolidation state – one in which financial markets can
again have confidence, and for longer than just for the moment – is a long-drawn process. At its conclusion stands a new fiscal regime with public austerity as a fundamental
principle governing the relationship between state and society: a reformed “configuration of political interests, institutions, and policy arrangements that structure conflicts
over taxes and spending … a particular political context of institutions, powerful organizations, public policies, and dominant ideas” (Pierson 2001: 56–57) .
Ending the secular build-up of public debt and regaining the confidence of financial
markets requires deep changes in political institutions and social structures. Already the
gradual cutting down on new debt towards a balanced budget, which tends to take several years, would be unsustainable unless accompanied by a redefinition of the responsibilities of government and the purposes of public policy, in the direction of a smaller
state and an expanded market, less public and more private provision, privatization of
25 In fact, at high levels of indebtedness even otherwise auspicious conditions may not make borrowers incur additional debt, for fear of bankruptcy. European growth rhetoric is to pacify voters, Social-Democratic parties, and Southern member states. It also plays on the ambivalence of
creditors who want consolidation and growth at the same time. Experience tells them, however,
that additional debt, if allowed, will simply be added to existing debt, rather than being used to
advance consolidation.
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MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
state activities and assets, and a substitution of individual effort for collective solidarity.
Ultimately, the construction of a consolidation state embedded in a consolidation regime implies a far-reaching rationalization, or “economization,” of politics and society.
In the process states become less like sovereigns and more like firms: instead of overriding markets, they are to be responsive to them. Whereas the politics of democratic capitalism was to protect society from the “vagaries of the market” (Polanyi), the politics of
the consolidation state protects financial markets from what are for them the vagaries
of democratic politics.
Consolidation is to turn the activist-interventionist state of postwar democratic capitalism into a lean state receptive to market pressures. To be credible and effective, fiscal
discipline must be anchored in the political institutions that control the social production of collective demands. In the final analysis, the transformation of the debt state
into a consolidation state is to end the tendency, envisaged under both “Wagner’s Law”
and the Marxian conjecture of an increasing socialization of production, for a maturing
capitalist-industrial society to require ever-rising levels of public support – of infrastructural investment and all sorts of collective repair work and compensation – up to
a point where capitalist industrialism would become incompatible with private ownership in the means of production. Imposing public austerity on the debt state of the
late twentieth century may be interpreted as an effort to escape this trend, in response
to the growing resistance of capitalist society against being taxed for public provision.
What results is a large-scale political experiment turning over to private enterprise the
tasks of insuring against social risks, providing welfare, education and health, building
and maintaining physical infrastructures, and even parts of government itself (warfare,
the collection of intelligence). In this way, the establishment of the consolidation state
would represent the final stage of the (neo-)liberalization process that began with the
end of the “roaring seventies” (Streeck 2014a).
As indicated, the model of a consolidation state is the United States after it imposed an
austerity regime on itself in the 1990s (Pierson 1998). An important step along the way
was “the end of welfare as we have come to know it” under the Clinton presidency.26
The fact that the reform was pushed through by a Democratic president only reinforced
its confidence-building effect. Further contributing to it was that the gradual progress
towards a balanced budget, and then towards a budget surplus at the end of Clinton’s
second term, was achieved through spending cuts rather than revenue increases. In fact,
shrinking the deficit by shrinking public spending was accompanied by substantial tax
cuts which, while repeatedly renewing the deficit, created pressures for more spending
cuts once “fighting the deficit” had been established as the supreme principle of the new
regime (Pierson 2001).
26 This refers to the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996.
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
21
Clinton’s successor immediately squandered the Clinton surplus on tax cuts, advertised
by George W. Bush during his presidential campaign in 2000 as “returning to citizens
what is rightfully theirs.” Yet neither this nor the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did anything to diminish the confidence of financial markets. The United States has more than
one way to reassure its creditors, including its capacity to produce unlimited amounts
of a global reserve currency out of thin air. That the American government nevertheless administered the bitter medicine of domestic austerity to its already anemic welfare
state in the 1990s can only have added to financial markets’ trust in its “full credit,” on
top of the culturally established primacy of financial market obligations over citizen
entitlements. Moreover, to the extent that the United States runs a deficit to finance
its military and its wars, it can ask resource-rich allies to buy treasury bonds in return
for protection, making it unnecessary for the latter to maintain military forces of their
own. Also, spending on warfare is discretionary and temporary; and like tax cuts and
tax expenditures, it may also be used to justify spending cuts in other areas. Even major
increases in public deficits, which would make borrowing unaffordable for other countries, cannot therefore detract from the United States’ standing in financial markets.
European countries, less privileged than the United States, began a decade later to re­
invent themselves as consolidation states. Their efforts at installing an austerity regime
as a credible commitment to market conformity had to go further than American efforts, given their competitive disadvantages in capital markets: no global currency, no
military capabilities worth paying for, generally higher state shares in their economies,
and citizens more insistent on social rights and entitlements. Anchoring national pledges to fiscal austerity in international law – like in the Fiscal Compact – helped, as did
the emerging hegemony of a country like Germany, which has historically thrived on
export-driven growth and a hard-currency regime.27 Growing debt burdens after 2008
increased the pressure for a second, even more determined round of consolidation efforts, aimed at reducing state shares and freeing up capacities to service the remaining
public debt. As elsewhere, consolidation in Europe does not have to be accomplished
overnight; phasing in spending cuts over time even seems preferable, as it allows for the
gradual settling in of an austerity regime as a permanent feature of political economy.
How austerity may become permanent as a country moves from budget deficits to a
stable surplus has recently been shown by Lukas Haffert (2014). Haffert debates what
he calls the “symmetry hypothesis,” which is that a state, once it has overcome a chronic
deficit, may use its regained fiscal capacity to return to political activism and restore
the programs it had temporarily cut. In fact, as Haffert shows, this is often the promise
made by social-democratic governments when embarking on public austerity. In reality, however, spending patterns after consolidation remain dedicated to austerity, which
becomes the central virtue distinguishing a neoliberal consolidation state from its debtstate predecessor. Haffert explains this by the fact that the transition from rising to
27 Or, in Mertens’ (2014) term, an export-and-saving regime.
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MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
declining debt levels is associated with and can only be accomplished by deep changes
in political and institutional routines, in the configuration of vested interests, and in
power relations and ideologies that are impossible to reverse on short order.
What are the lasting political-economic consequences of states devoting themselves to
fiscal consolidation, in order to reassure financial markets that they will consider their
debt obligations sacrosanct and do whatever it takes to remain fit for debt service? Four
such consequences have been established by recent research.
1. Budget balancing, if achieved by spending cuts rather than tax increases, and even
more so if accompanied by tax cuts, comes at the expense of discretionary as distinguished from mandatory spending (Streeck/Mertens 2010b, 2011). As public budgets
approach a balance, a growing share of government expenditure goes to cover comparatively rigid, legally fixed expenditures, such as wages for public sector workers,
public pensions, and, of course, debt service. As the latter is sacrosanct in a consolidation state, it is public investment, both in the physical infrastructure and in
education, families, active labor market policy and the like – what has been called
“soft” (Streeck/Mertens 2011) or “social” (Morel et al. 2012) investment – that must
give. Over a longer term, this will produce pressures also on “entitlements” like social security, making them more politically vulnerable and less mandatory in effect.
Complaints about old commitments suffocating spending for the future and strangling “fiscal democracy” (Steuerle et al. 1998; Streeck/Mertens 2010a) by denying
governments political discretion (Rose 1990) may also result in less generous benefits
for subsequent generations, while the benefits of existing claimants are frozen under
so-called “grandfather clauses.” This is likely further to de-legitimate social policies.
2. Budget balancing allows no new debt, and this holds all the more for debt reduction
by fiscal surplus. Public investment will therefore have to be paid for out of what
will very likely be shrinking current revenue. Regaining and retaining the confidence
of financial markets may therefore require governments to cut public investment
even if real interest rates on government debt approach zero. Resulting deficiencies
in physical and social infrastructures must be attended to by private investors assuming what had previously been public responsibilities. One effect is likely to be
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) of various sorts, with private investment backed
by the public, and governments or individual citizens paying user fees to private
firms. Indications are that states and citizens will tend to be paying more under such
arrangements than they would have paid had the investment remained in public
hands. This seems to hold especially for local communities, which often lack the
expertise to negotiate as equals with the legal departments of international investors.
3. Cutting discretionary expenditure inevitably involves cuts in social services such as
education and especially in universal services benefiting all citizens. As the range and
quality of state-provided services consequently deteriorate, the middle class will look
for complementary or alternative private provision, and governments will be urged
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
23
to allow private firms to compete with public authorities. In the process, the betterto-do will get habituated to more customized provision, which will make them demand (further) tax cuts so they can pay for them – tax cuts that will drive further
spending cuts. As the welfare state then loses growing segments of its middle-class
constituency, public programs will turn into programs for the poor which, according
to an American adage, will make them poor programs.
4. Privatization of investment in physical and social infrastructures gives rise to a growing private industry operating in what used to be the public sector. While typically
subject to regulation, private providers are likely soon to become powerful players in
the political arena where they will ally with the upwardly mobile middle class and its
liberal-conservative political parties. The evolving connections of the new firms with
the government, often taking the form of a revolving-door exchange of personnel,
and their campaign contributions will further cement the shift from a redistributive
towards a neoliberal state that abandons to civil society and the market its responsibility to provide for social equity and social cohesion.
The most advanced case of a consolidation state with a firmly established austerity regime is, surprisingly, the former model country of Social Democracy, Sweden (on the
following see Haffert/Mehrtens 2013; Mehrtens 2014). Here the departure from the
post-1970s debt state was much more thorough and went much farther than in the
United States, where consolidation was and is made less compulsory by the competitive
advantages the country enjoys in global capital markets. It is also interesting to note that
Sweden is not a member of the EMU and still has its national currency, meaning that it
was not forced to consolidate by international treaties. Sweden is, however, deeply traumatized by the experience of its two fiscal and financial crises in 1977 and 1991, crises
far more severe than in most European countries after 2008.28 The lesson learned at the
time across the entire Swedish political spectrum was that international financial markets would not hesitate to punish the country mercilessly if they were to lose confidence
in it, and that restoring and preserving that confidence had to be the foremost objective
of national economic policy.
Sweden’s consolidation state operates an austerity regime based on two fundamental
principles: an ironclad commitment to a fiscal surplus generated and continuously renewed by spending cuts, to bring down the accumulated debt; and regular tax cuts to
renew the pressure for spending cuts and enable the middle classes to replace public
benefits and services by self-provision in free markets. Combining a surplus policy with
28 Between 1977 and 1983, Swedish total public debt more than doubled, from 30 percent of GDP
to 70 percent, with a peak deficit of seven percent of GDP in 1982. After four years of a budget
surplus around four percent, public debt increased again, from 48 to 84 percent between 1990
and 1995, with a peak deficit of 11 percent in 1993. Beginning in 1998, it was gradually reduced
to 50 percent in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis (Mehrtens 2013: 70). From 1998
to 2008, the Swedish state ran a budget surplus; with cyclical adjustment the surplus has continued up to the present (Haffert/Mehrtens 2013: 24).
24
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
lower taxes makes for a shrinking state share in the national economy, producing a
leaner state increasingly in line with neoliberal prescriptions of a non-activist public
policy. Obviously, Swedish neoliberal reform was and is facilitated by the fact that it
started at a very high level of government activity, so that a national austerity regime
has a lot of state activity to feed upon for a protracted time. While the Swedish landing
path can therefore be a particularly long one, however, the country’s consolidation regime has become so deeply engrained over time that it is hard to imagine how it could
be displaced in any foreseeable future.
By the end of 2014, roughly two decades of neoliberal reform had, incrementally but
all the more effectively, changed the Swedish political economy almost beyond recognition (Haffert/Mehrtens 2013; Mehrtens 2014). Since the peak of the second crisis in
1993, total government expenditure was brought down from 70 to 50 percent of GDP,
and total revenue from 60 to 50 percent (2012). This process is expected to continue,
assisted by deep changes in political-economic institutions which, for example, prevent
the central bank from accommodating an expansionary fiscal policy:
The medium-term financial forecast of the Swedish government for the years 2013–2015 projected surpluses of up to three percent of GDP … The estimated annual surplus is up to three
percent of GDP. The improvement of the budget balance would be achieved solely by expenditure cuts and not by revenue increases. (Haffert/Mehrtens 2013: 21)
The economic downturn after 2011 did not cause a rethinking of fiscal priorities. Transition from high to low taxing and spending was accomplished, among other things, by a
pension reform (1994/1998) that has made the pension system “completely independent
financially from the budget. There is no longer any cross-subsidization from the public
purse to the pension funds” (ibid.: 17). In spite of the fiscal surplus, pensions were cut in
2010 and will be further cut in future, in line with expected shortfalls in revenue due to
demographic change. There also was what was called the “tax reform of the century” in
1990 and 1991, which contributed to the fiscal crisis of the early 1990s and helped justify
the subsequent cuts in public expenditure. Taxes were further lowered in 2006 and 2008,
as well as in several subsequent years. The reform made the tax system more regressive
as capital incomes were taxed much lower than incomes from labor, property taxes were
abolished, and the value-added tax remained one of the highest in the world.
Fiscal consolidation, in Sweden no less than elsewhere, was associated with a steep decline in both “soft” and “hard” public investment (Streeck/Mertens 2011). Among other
things, spending on active labor market policy was more than halved. Simultaneously,
unemployment stabilized at around eight percent, a radically new normal in the Swedish labor market that would have been completely unimaginable before the first fiscal
crisis and the monetarist turn under the Social-Democratic Carlsson government. Consolidation was also accompanied by a steep increase in income inequality, steeper than
in almost all other advanced capitalist societies. Moreover, from 1998 to 2010, the share
of students in private schools below the university level increased from two to twelve
Streeck: The Rise of the European Consolidation State
25
percent, exceeding the respective ratio in the United States (Mehrtens 2013: 220).29
Privatization is rapidly proceeding also in the large Swedish healthcare and childcare
sectors. Further adherence to the policy of combining tax cuts with debt repayment,
thereby shrinking the state, seems assured as the new consolidation regime has become
firmly entrenched in the Swedish political economy in the past two decades.
5 The consolidation state and democracy
The regime of the consolidation state involves a deep transformation of democracy
as we know it, away from traditional institutions of popular political participation
designed to stand up for social equity against the laws of the market (Streeck 2014a:
58ff.). Where there are fewer public goods due to privatization, there is less to decide
politically, and the economic democracy of capitalism – one dollar, one vote – begins
to replace political democracy. With markets becoming the principal mechanisms of
collective decision-making – by aggregation instead of deliberation – there is even less
“fiscal democracy” left than in the rigidified debt state of old. This is also because, at the
macro level, public finances are increasingly constrained by constitutionally enshrined
debt limits and balanced-budget rules. In the European case, there are also international
agreements on fiscal austerity from which countries can break away only at high political and economic cost.
Institutional restructuring towards a consolidation state abandons democratic principles in several other respects as well. Public-private partnerships are often based on
complex commercial contracts, large parts of which have to remain confidential to protect trade secrets. As independent central banks rise to become the principal agents of
economic policy, political decisions with far-reaching social consequences move out of
the purview of parliaments and elected governments. Central banks are run by small
bodies deliberating in secrecy, and given the significance of their decisions for the rational expectations of economic agents this cannot be otherwise. Also, whether or not
economic policies conform to the needs of the markets cannot be decided by political
debate but only by the markets themselves, and whether economic policies are “right”
is for the technocratic experts to determine who are charged with applying the rules by
which policies are to be bound. All of this requires and advances a decoupling of the
management of the economy from democratic politics – backed ideologically by newly
fashionable elitist theories claiming democracy to be irrational, incapable of dealing
with complex problems, too slow to respond to changing conditions in a global economy, and too vulnerable to popular pressures for economically inefficient intervention
in free markets (Bell 2006).
29 At the secondary school level, the ratio was already at 50 percent in 2010, with roughly 90 percent of private school operators being profit-oriented corporations (Mehrtens 2014: 223).
26
MPIfG Discussion Paper 15/1
Turning the economy over to a combination of free markets and technocracy makes
political participation run dry (Schäfer/Streeck 2013b). Where national democratic institutions are neutralized by international “governance,” as under European Monetary
Union, their de-politicized empty spaces are likely to be filled with new content, which
may be public entertainment of the “post-democracy” kind (Crouch 2004) or some
politically regressive sort of nationalism. Under the auspices of the emerging consolidation state, politicization is migrating to the right side of the political spectrum where
anti-establishment parties are getting better and better at organizing discontented citizens dependent upon public services and insisting on political protection from international markets.
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